JBR Capital has launched as a funder for prestige and classic vehicles.
The finance company, which was co-founded by Darren Selig, chief executive officer at JBR, is owned by Cabot Square Capital.
Initially Cabot plans to invest up to £30m in JBR to fund further business growth.
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Speaking to Motor Finance, Selig said: "I am pleased we were introduced to Cabot Square because they have great experience in building credit related platforms, and experience in motor finance."
This experience includes the November acquisition of Blue Motor Finance, a fellow motor finance company that lends for more regular cars, by the private equity investor.
According to Selig, there have been informal chats between JBR and Blue to share experience and discuss operational set up. However, he said: "There are no plans to cross share information or customers at all. Blue are a consumer lending autoscoring lender"
With regards to his own experience, in 2002, Selig became managing director of broker London Asset Finance, which also focused on prestige vehicles. From this he moved to a joint venture with Investec, however this ended in June.
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By GlobalData"JBR Capital is a new start entity. Cabot is acquiring my knowledge, experience, intellectual property and experience working in this market for the last 12 years. What I bring is not only experience but contacts and distribution – key relationships I have with manufacturers, dealers, brokers etc. And obviously the direct client base I have." He said.
According to a statement from the company, JBR is the only lender that solely focuses on the prestige car funding niche. Selig says this should give the lender a competitive advantage: "It’s all about speed, service and specialist knowledge. We’re not the only finance company in the market who will fund high value vehicles, but the ones who do tend to be part of banks or asset finance houses, or doing other things.
"So you’ll get general asset lenders who look at high value vehicles, but do trucks and trailers and IT, and everything else. Whereas this is our complete focus and all we do. So we feel we can bring that specialist knowledge into the dealers."
The company will lend between £25,000 and £1m for prestige cars. The route to market will be through brokers and dealers, though Selig says the primary focus will be through point of sale at dealers.
It is offering hire purchase and lease purchase agreements for terms of up to 60 months, with both fixed and variable finance rates.
Unlike mainstream lenders, JBR won’t use a standard credit scoring for the majority of its deals as, according to Selig, the system does not work for everyone in the ‘high net worth individual’ bracket, that is to say someone with assets over £500,000 on top of their primary residence.
He said: "a lot of them don’t tick all of the boxes – for instance they might not be on the electoral roll, or they might not have much credit history because they’ve not used much finance before or they might arrange their finances in different ways that don’t fit the mould for a computer scoring system.
"So we take this very manual back to basic approach where we look at the customer on a holistic basis. This means we collate a lot of information and data on all kinds of things, whether it be credit searches, what property do they own, what their asset base is. We try to really understand and dig into the customer to be able to find a way to transact the deal and get comfortable credit wise with them, whereas a computer would just fail them."
